Both my mother and I grew up in Chita, Japan, which is now famous for its whisky. It is the first single grain whisky from the house of Suntory. Someone on Reddit said, “Although it has more fire than expected it is still very smooth and easy drinking. This seriously tastes like Kelogg’s Honey Loops.”
I’ve never had Kelogg’s Honey Loops, but I learned the cereal is made from wheat, oat, barley, and rye, which are the same ingredients as the whisky, so I guess it makes sense.
When we visited my mother’s friend who owns a bar in Nagoya this past summer, he scoffed at Chita whisky.
“It’s overpriced for what it is. It’s made in Chita because Chita grows corn.”
My mother’s friend, the bar owner, was very hospitable. He made us each a custom cocktail after asking us what kind of liquor and flavors we enjoyed and served us fresh cut pineapples and rice crackers. He wore a white collared shirt with a thin bowtie and a white jacket. I don’t think he’s changed his bartending attire since opening his place in the ‘80s. I found it charming.
He used to do photography back in the day, lived in India for a few years, but was now back in Chita, caring for his aging parents and his wife, who has early onset dementia.
My mother has been friends with him since middle school. They went to juku together, to prep for the never-ending entrance exams they were told would determine so much of their future. Neither of them ended up in a four-year college.
I asked him, “What was my mother like in middle school?” and he smiled and said, “She hasn’t changed. She’s always been this charming. She’s always had this gravitational energy.” My mother laughed, and she didn’t deny it.
He likes to send my mother photos of flowers with 花言葉, or the language of flowers, when she is back in America.
The language of flowers, or floriography, was a Victorian-era means of communication. Various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages to express feelings without words. Suitors would watch for subtle reactions after gifting a tussie-mussie: if the bouquet was held at heart level, the recipient liked what they saw; if the bouquet was held downwards, it was a no.
A mimosa represented chastity because the leaves of the mimosa close at night, or when touched. White carnation meant pure love and good luck, and a pink one, a mother’s undying love.
“Does he send you photos all the time?” I asked my mother.
“Yeah, whenever he sees a flower, I think,” she said.
“Do you think he likes you?” I teased.
“Maybe.”
The 花言葉 for 朝顔, or morning glory, is “fleeting love” and “tight bond.” “Fleeting love” because morning glories only bloom in the morning and withers by nighttime, and “tight bond” because it winds tightly around a stake.
Back when I lived in Japan, one of my summer homework assignments was to keep my morning glory alive. We’d grown it from a seed at school, and I carried it home before the summer so I could care for it. We kept it out on the balcony so it’d get plenty of sun, and I went out every morning to give it water. “おはよう、朝顔ちゃん。今日も元気そうだね。”
Talking to plants is something I’ve inherited from my mother. She still talks to plants when she waters them, encourages them to grow taller, stronger, but also asks them how they are feeling, if they are thirsty. “You need to talk to them to figure out what they need. More water? Less? More light?” This is similar to how she taught me to feel the vibrations through cooking chopsticks, to figure out if the tempura is done frying or not. I try so hard to feel the vibrations, but I admit I don’t feel anything.
I made a sketch of the morning glory every morning too, because that was part of the assignment. To keep a flower journal and also a life journal. But the life journal, I usually did on the last day of vacation, like kids do. When we returned to school in late August, we all whispered to each other, “Hey, did you do the diary yesterday too?? Hopefully it’s not obvious!”
When I was a baby, my grandmother thought I was special. I liked to bring my hands up to my face and move my fingers around and just watch them. I looked like a little scientist, trying to figure out why my fingers moved the way they did. Trying to learn I had fingers. Trying to know what it meant to control them. “She’s smart,” my grandmother said.
Before I was born, my mother told her mother that she had fallen in love with an American while abroad and was going to have a child with him. My grandmother reacted maybe stronger than my mother expected. She shouted, “I didn’t raise you to marry an American!”
She shouted like that because she grew up during the war. She had memories hiding in bunkers whenever the sirens went off. “One time, an earthquake hit when we were hiding, and we all thought we would be buried alive. Another time, it was raining so hard it started flooding. I don’t know how many times I thought I might die.
“Your poor child is going to have rocks thrown at her because she’s half American,” she warned.
But when I came into the world, my grandmother quickly fell in love. She took care of me and showed me off to all her friends. “Look at her big eyes,” she’d say, as her friends ohhed and ahhed at me.
Not long after, my grandmother died. She was diagnosed with lung cancer and within months, she was gone. I was only three months old.
In the hospital room, my grandmother covered the walls with photos of her grandchildren. She thought looking at them would help her get better.
She eventually slipped into a coma. My mother said sometimes she’d bite down on whatever tubes they were trying to force down her throat. She thinks she was in pain but she wasn’t able to scream.
My mother regrets the last days of her mother’s life, because when she was still conscious, my mother fed her strange foods that she read would cure cancer. Fruits and herbs her mother didn’t want to eat, but my mother forced her to because she was desperate to keep her mother.
“I should’ve just given her whatever she wanted to eat. I was so stupid. It’s my biggest regret.” There was no time for my mother to resolve anything with her mother before she died. No time to let bygones be bygones. All she could do was apologize again and again and weep next to her still body.
I once told a therapist I was born into tragedy. She scribbled that ferociously on her notepad and looked at me square in the face and said, “No.” I was taken aback by how firmly she pushed back. I thought therapists were supposed to just listen. “You weren’t. Just think about your mother. She was going through this awful thing, watching her mother become sick and die. But she had you. Think about how much joy you must’ve given her. How much hope.”
I’m not a mother, so I don’t know how much joy a child can give you. To me, motherhood seems hard. Maybe too hard for it to be worth it. There is a lot of pressure women face to become a mother.
Yet a part of me knows I would be a good mother if I chose to be.
And a part of me knows it to be true when my therapist tells me about the joys and happiness I brought to my mother when she was grieving the loss of hers.
“You and your sister are the reason I’m still alive,” my mother has said to me, more than once.
My heart can only contain so much.
Rebecca Suzuki is a Queens-based writer, translator, and poet. Her book, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, was the winner of the Loose Translation Prize and published in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Killing the Buddha, Riverteeth Journal, and other places. She teaches writing at Queens College, CUNY.